PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: There's always been farming on this hill. I took this a week ago after a morning of photographing the barns from the fields below. The farmer who dug this barn deep into the hillside and near its top, knew that on chilly mornings he'd have the early sun on his back and on the backs of his cows, and that he'd catch the sun again in the afternoon as he loaded hay directly into the hay loft from the street side. The 1853 map shows no barns, but the house is there, right where the road from town turns just as it does today as if it were to lead from town right up the front steps onto porch, only turning sharply left at the last moment to climb the hill rather than the stairs. Was it the Elliotts, who lived in the house in 1853, who built this barn?
The porch is gone from the vacant house. When did they stop farming here? Was it in 1928 when the creamery closed or in 1930 when the railroad stopped running, or were there dairy cows in the fields when I first passed by? Last year some of the barn boards were stripped away and the cupola tipped a bit more this year, and the roof won't survive another winter. One day I will come by and find the cupola fallen through the roof and smashed on the floor, the weather vane and it's four miniature gables shattered.
But it's impossible to know when. Perhaps it is miraculous that farming continues on this hill at all, more miraculous that some of the original families are farming here still.
5 comments:
Interesting post, I guess this is an HDR picture!!!!
I'm not sure I like HDR better than original pictures.
Do you?
You are correct that it is an HDR. If you tried making HDRs with Photomatix you know that there is broad range from very naturalistic to what I will call "pointillistic." At its worst, lighting can seemcompletely unnatural.
As a general principal I like to keep my HDRs fairly naturalistic. The previous image is also an HDR. However, there are times when my I like that painterly effect despite the bad philosophical repute of painterly photographers. In any case, I hope I have applied HDR in ways that don't immediately scream HDR photograph. If that's the case here, I've failed.
It is important to realize that there is another way besides its possible pointillism in which HDR is more like painting than photography. Because HRD draws information from 2 or more different exposures of the same scene, it has the potential for being more like the way we really see. If one is wedded to the unrealistic way photography records contrasty scenes, HDR is the wrong choice. However, unlike photographers, painters never suffered from the limits of photo technology. Their whole sense of the visual world comes from their eye, not from a photographic device.
HDR permits photographers to overcome the limits imposed by technology. Some day all cameras will capture the range now only possible through HDR.
If you look at it that way then it's ok of course, I do like the picture but was wondering if original has another atmosphere, yes I would like to see the original pictures.
HDR's are a bit unreal sometimes and it's just what the creator sees in it.
Always learning whenever coming here...
Dick - The other image is now in your mail box. I wonder what you think.
GMG - Welcome back.
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